Examining Stakeholder Perspectives: Process, Performance and Progress of the Age-Friendly Taiwan Program.

Since Taiwans age-friendly city (AFC) program was launched in 2012, the central government has provided various resources to the countrys 22 local authorities, including budgetary support, policy advocacy, and consultation from a team of experts. This study examines stakeholder perspectives on the process, performance, and outcome of the AFC program. A 53-item questionnaire was developed based on the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline, including mechanisms and processes (20 items), outcome evaluations (23 items), and resource integration (10 items). There was a great difference found among scores between facilitators and experts for inter-exchange experience with local and international cities (40%) and monitor and revise indicators (37%) in mechanisms and processes, evaluate performance of indicators and action plans (37%) in outcome evaluations, and interaction between government and community (46%) and interaction between civil organization and senior society (39%) in resource integration. Clearly, facilitators showed overly optimistic assessments in AFC mechanisms and processes, outcome evaluation, and resource integration. The results showed disconnect between experts expectations versus actual practice conducted by facilitators. Implications of these findings are to integrate top down expectations with the realities of bottom up practice to design more realistic evaluations; continue to educate stakeholders about design, implementation and evaluation; and further integrate resources from government, civil organizations, and community

Effort-reward imbalance and self-rated health among Gambian healthcare professionals

Questionnaire for the Investigation of Effort-reward Imbalance and Self-rated Health among Gambian Healthcare Professionals. (DOC 616 kb

Rough-set-based ADR signaling from spontaneous reporting data with missing values

AbstractSpontaneous reporting systems of adverse drug events have been widely established in many countries to collect as could as possible all adverse drug events to facilitate the detection of suspected ADR signals via some statistical or data mining methods. Unfortunately, due to privacy concern or other reasons, the reporters sometimes may omit consciously some attributes, causing many missing values existing in the reporting database. Most of research work on ADR detection or methods applied in practice simply adopted listwise deletion to eliminate all data with missing values. Very little work has noticed the possibility and examined the effect of including the missing data in the process of ADR detection.This paper represents our endeavor towards the exploration of this question. We aim at inspecting the feasibility of applying rough set theory to the ADR detection problem. Based on the concept of utilizing characteristic set based approximation to measure the strength of ADR signals, we propose twelve different rough set based measuring methods and show only six of them are feasible for the purpose. Experimental results conducted on the FARES database show that our rough-set-based approach exhibits similar capability in timeline warning of suspicious ADR signals as traditional method with missing deletion, and sometimes can yield noteworthy measures earlier than the traditional method

Topological and organizational properties of the products of house-keeping and tissue-specific genes in protein-protein interaction networks

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Human cells of various tissue types differ greatly in morphology despite having the same set of genetic information. Some genes are expressed in all cell types to perform house-keeping functions, while some are selectively expressed to perform tissue-specific functions. In this study, we wished to elucidate how proteins encoded by human house-keeping genes and tissue-specific genes are organized in human protein-protein interaction networks. We constructed protein-protein interaction networks for different tissue types using two gene expression datasets and one protein-protein interaction database. We then calculated three network indices of topological importance, the degree, closeness, and betweenness centralities, to measure the network position of proteins encoded by house-keeping and tissue-specific genes, and quantified their local connectivity structure.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Compared to a random selection of proteins, house-keeping gene-encoded proteins tended to have a greater number of directly interacting neighbors and occupy network positions in several shortest paths of interaction between protein pairs, whereas tissue-specific gene-encoded proteins did not. In addition, house-keeping gene-encoded proteins tended to connect with other house-keeping gene-encoded proteins in all tissue types, whereas tissue-specific gene-encoded proteins also tended to connect with other tissue-specific gene-encoded proteins, but only in approximately half of the tissue types examined.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our analysis showed that house-keeping gene-encoded proteins tend to occupy important network positions, while those encoded by tissue-specific genes do not. The biological implications of our findings were discussed and we proposed a hypothesis regarding how cells organize their protein tools in protein-protein interaction networks. Our results led us to speculate that house-keeping gene-encoded proteins might form a core in human protein-protein interaction networks, while clusters of tissue-specific gene-encoded proteins are attached to the core at more peripheral positions of the networks.</p

Multi-Operator Fairness in Transparent RAN Sharing by Soft-Partition With Blocking and Dropping Mechanism

Radio access network (RAN) sharing has attracted significant attention from telecom operators as a means of accommodating data surges. However, current mechanisms for RAN sharing ignore the fairness issue among operators, and hence the RAN may be under- or over-utilized. Furthermore, the fairness among different operators cannot be guaranteed, since the RAN resources are distributed on a first come, first served basis. Accordingly, the present study proposes a “soft-partition with blocking and dropping” (SBD) mechanism that offers inter-operator fairness using a “soft-partition” approach. In particular, the operator subscribers are permitted to overuse the resources specified in the predefined service-level-agreement when the shared RAN is under-utilized, but are blocked (or even dropped) when the RAN is over-utilized. The simulation results show that SBD achieves an inter-operator fairness of 0.997, which is higher than that of both a hard-partition approach (0.98) and a no-partition approach (0.6) while maintaining a shared RAN utilization rate of 98%. Furthermore, SBD reduces the blocking rate from 35% (hard partition approach) to almost 0%, whereas controlling the dropping rate at 5%. Notably, the dropping rate can be reduced to almost 0% using a newly proposed bandwidth scale down procedure.This work was supported in part by H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL under Grant 761586, and in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan under Contract MOST 106-2218- E-009-018

Gender Determination using Fingerprint Features

Several previous studies have investigated the gender difference of the fingerprint features. However, regarding to the statistical significance of such differences, inconsistent results have been obtained. To resolve this problem and to develop a method for gender determination, this work proposes and tests three fingertip features for gender determination. Fingerprints were obtained from 115 normal healthy adults comprised of 57 male and 58 female volunteers. All persons were born in Taiwan and were of Han nationality. The age range was18-35 years. The features of this study are ridge count, ridge density, and finger size, all three of which can easily be determined by counting and calculation. Experimental results show that the tested ridge density features alone are not very effective for gender determination. However, the proposed ridge count and finger size features of left little fingers are useful, achieving a classification accuracy of 75% (P-valu

A New Seamless Bitstream Switching Scheme for H.264 Video Adaptation with Enhanced Coding Performance

[[abstract]]In this paper, we propose a new seamless bitstream switching scheme to improve the coding performance of H.264 SP-frames for rate adaptation. Our method removes one of the two re-quantization blocks in the SP-frame encoders so as to significantly improve coding performance. The seamless switching property of SP-frames is retained by properly restructuring the primary and secondary switching frame codecs. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme achieves close coding performance to that of regular H.264 P-frames and significantly better performance than that of SP-frames. The proposed method also provides the advantage of using a single secondary switching bitstream for both switching-up and switching-down processes[[fileno]]2030144030014[[department]]電機工程學

Online assessment of patients' views on hospital performances using Rasch model's KIDMAP diagram

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To overcome the drawback of individual item-by-item box plots of disclosure for patient views on healthcare service quality, we propose to inspect interrelationships among items that measure a common entity. A visual diagram on the Internet is developed to provide thorough information for hospitals.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We used the Rasch rating scale model to analyze the 2003 English inpatient questionnaire data regarding patient satisfactory perception, which were collected from 169 hospitals, examined model-data fit, and developed a KIDMAP diagram on the Internet depicting the satisfaction level of each hospital and investigating aberrant responses with Z-scores and MNSQ statistics for individual hospitals. Differential item functioning (DIF) analysis was conducted to verify construct equivalence across types of hospitals.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>18 of the 45 items fit to the model's expectations, indicating they jointly defined a common construct and an equal-interval logit scale was achieved. The most difficult aspect for hospitals to earn inpatients' satisfaction were item 29 (staff told you about any medication side effects to watch when going home). No DIF in the 18-item questionnaire was found between types of hospitals, indicating the questionnaire measured the same construct across hospitals. Different types of hospitals obtained different levels of satisfaction. The KIDMAP on the Internet provided more interpretable and visualized message than traditional item-by-item box plots of disclosure.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>After removing misfit items, we find that the 18-item questionnaire measures the same construct across types of hospitals. The KIDMAP on the Internet provides an exemplary comparison in quality of healthcare. Rasch analysis allows intra- and inter-hospital performances to be compared easily and reliably with each other on the Internet.</p

A New Business Model of Electronic Commerce with Innovative Strategies

There are a lot of problems that make the business of electronic stores very difficult, especially for those firms that lack the required expertise and resources for running an electronic business. This study proposes a new business model of electronic commerce (EC), which aims to tackle those problems and help enterprises run electronic stores well. This model applies the franchise system of chain store, a very successful modern business model, to the management of electronic stores to take advantage of the chain’s competitive power by integrating individual affiliate sites as a whole. There are eight components in the model. Implementation strategies of the model, which are quite different from those generic strategies commonly used in implementing business models, are also proposed. The feasibility of the model and its implementation strategies were validated using the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), the case study, and the questionnaire survey approaches. Finally, practical implications for applying the model are discussed, and directions for further study are also suggested